This recent E3 has been big, really big.
With Fallout 4 being confirmed (confirmed) and a modern Final Fantasy 7 remake being announced.

Regular readers will know that I detest film remakes, finding them to be the one of the laziest form of film making possible, usually they are so different to the source material that they’re a remake in name only or they significantly change the established canon of a film series.
But does the same hold true for gaming?
In all honesty, I can’t say, I’ve never actually played an actual remake of a game, I’ve played many re-release and minor graphical upgrade to a game, but to fully remake a game?

So with trepidation I look towards the remake of Final Fantasy VII.
You see, I loved FF7, it was one of the first games I really got into, one of the only games I really needed to be a completionist over, and though the game itself only counts 99 hours of gameplay, I myself lost count at over 200 hours of gameplay (including Lvl99’ing my characters and boosting their stats further), I still frequent the #FinalFantasy channel on the Undernet IRC server, and I’ve made some great friends through shared interests of the game (One of them even wrote his own thoughts on the remake, if you’re Dutch or don’t mind google translate, go read it here: http://www.gamedomein.net/final-fantasy-vii-remaaaaaaaaaake/).
It is due to my love of FF7 I approach any addition to the series with concern, I mean we’ve had already had sequels made to FF7 with each changing the combat system of the game and the film Advent Children, which finally answered if Humanity survived the events of FF7.
But having seen everything tacked onto FF7 change the world just a little, I can’t be too confident in the remake.
Oh wait, it’s not even a remake, they’re “reimagining” the game, which is a way they can get carte blanche to change what ever they wish.

And that is my concern, that we’ll end up with a shell of FF7 with the characters, combat and major plot points changed.
My ideal outcome would be a game in which the main game is the same, but they add more to the world, flesh things out further and make a much richer world.
If you played the game, you might recall there were a few random items that had no actual use, like the 1/35 Soldier or the Super Sweeper which don’t actually do anything and sure everyone has a theory, with the most outlandish being an instant death for Safer Sephiroth if exact conditions are met but how many people have actually done any of these? They’re always things that we hear about but never things we see or do.
But what if these items actually had some purpose that was lost due to some time constraints? Now would be the perfect time to expand upon them, don’t you think?
And of course, there’s now time to perfect some of the less intuitive aspects of the game, some parts that were confusing others were just a little unresponsive and left you feeling as if you didn’t have control over the game no matter what you did at the time, now that is something that can be fixed!

And that is exactly what I want, I want more to explore, more to do just don’t go changing the game itself.
Give me something worth hunting, more Weapons to fight, but changing the core of the game is just going to break the ties of nostalgia that they’re trying to cash in upon.

Will I be buying the FF7 remake? Of course, hell if there’s a decent pre-order I might just have to do this, but I’m not sold on the name alone, it has to be a game worthy of the title.
Don’t accept a “spiritual successor”, don’t accept some weird multi-sword-in-one combo, an up to date graphically amazing yet true to source remake with a bigger world to explore.
Don’t settle for anything less.